The Future of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure on Solana

Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, or DePIN, represent one of the most ambitious applications of blockchain technology—using crypto coordination mechanisms to build real-world infrastructure that can compete with incumbent monopolies. In a comprehensive conversation on Lightspeed, Amira Valliani, the Head of DePIN at the Solana Foundation, laid out a compelling vision for how this emerging sector could fundamentally reshape everything from telecommunications to energy grids to robotics training data over the next five to seven years.

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The conversation revealed a sector in transformation, with DePIN networks on Solana having already rewarded contributors $400 million in the last year and a half alone. But Valliani's insights went far deeper than headline numbers, exploring the structural challenges facing DePIN adoption, the venture capital dynamics that may be holding back the space, and why the intersection of robotics and AI represents perhaps the most exciting frontier for decentralized infrastructure.

From the White House to Web3

Amira Valliani's path to leading DePIN initiatives at the Solana Foundation traces an unconventional arc through American institutions. Her career began in the Obama administration, where she served as a speechwriter at the State Department before moving to the National Security Council at the White House. This experience in government and national security would later inform her understanding of infrastructure resilience and the brittleness of centralized systems.

Following her government tenure, Valliani founded a creator economy company in the podcasting space, building software to help podcasters monetize their content. The experience reflected her belief that media is a critical component of functioning democracy and requires new monetization mechanisms. After selling that company in 2021, she began what she describes as a "crypto week" intended simply to become conversant at dinner parties about the technology.

"Crypto week turned into crypto two weeks turned into crypto month," Valliani explained. "I just became really enamored with the space and the idea of figuring out basically new mechanisms for how we can think about organizing ourselves economically and doing people more ownership in economic growth."

Her connections to early Solana team members led to an invitation to Breakpoint, where she immersed herself in the ecosystem without actively seeking employment. The timing proved fortuitous—Solana was gaining significant attention and needed someone to develop its policy engagement capabilities. Valliani became the first-ever Head of Policy at the Solana Foundation, building out that function before eventually transitioning to the growth-focused DePIN role she holds today.

What DePIN Leadership Actually Looks Like

The day-to-day responsibilities of leading DePIN at the Solana Foundation revolve primarily around supporting the teams building decentralized infrastructure networks. Valliani describes her role as highly variable but fundamentally focused on helping DePIN teams get unblocked and grow as quickly as possible.

"My goal is to see DePIN succeed," she stated plainly. "If I think about what our North Star is, how do we get that to $4 billion as quickly as possible back to contributors and DePIN networks?"

The work encompasses several distinct functions. First, there's supporting existing teams through technical assistance, facilitating introductions between projects, and connecting founders with potential customers—essentially the platform team function that a venture capital firm might provide. Second, there's the outreach and recruitment function of bringing the next wave of DePIN teams to build on Solana.

This second function requires particular creativity because the target founders often aren't crypto natives. They're experts in energy, astronomers, robotics engineers, or specialists in other fields who need to understand what blockchain coordination can enable for their work. Valliani's role involves significant marketing and storytelling to paint a vision of DePIN's future that draws these founders into the space.

The Current State of Solana's DePIN Ecosystem

From a public perception standpoint, the Solana DePIN ecosystem might be summarized as Helium at the top—a well-known project with subway advertisements and a clear public presence—followed by a tier of established projects like Hivemapper and io.net that have been around for some time but may not yet have achieved complete product-market fit, with new DePIN projects launching regularly.

However, Valliani's experience of the ecosystem differs from this characterization. She describes being "shocked at the number of really strong teams coming through and building in the space," though acknowledging that many remain at the seed or pre-seed stage, still building out node growth and figuring out product-market fit.

The standouts, in her view, include Helium and Hivemapper, the latter having announced deals with Lyft and Volkswagen in the past year. These represent projects that have achieved both meaningful scale and clear product-market fit. But the pipeline of earlier-stage companies with strong teams suggests the ecosystem's best growth may still lie ahead.

Three Narratives Driving DePIN Growth

Valliani identified three primary narratives where she sees the most significant growth potential for DePIN on Solana. Each represents a distinct thesis about where decentralized approaches to infrastructure can outcompete centralized alternatives.

DePIN for National Infrastructure Capacity

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of global infrastructure in ways that surprised many observers. Supply chains broke down, communication systems were strained, and GPS infrastructure was revealed to be more brittle than commonly assumed. This experience has catalyzed a new generation of DePIN projects taking distributed approaches to critical infrastructure.

"There's a whole sort of crop of DePINs that are popping up and doing things like taking distributed approaches to tracking shipping, distributed approaches to figuring out how to track satellites or doing satellite communication, monitoring, different sort of logistics capabilities," Valliani explained.

Projects like Wingbits, 375 AI, and SkyMapper have built extensive node coverage and are now focused on converting that infrastructure into revenue. Major airlines, for example, are reportedly working with some of these companies to fill coverage gaps in their operations. The thesis is straightforward: if centralized infrastructure has proven brittle, distributed alternatives become increasingly valuable.

Energy Grid Decentralization

Energy represents what Valliani calls "a perpetual question in DePIN" because of the inherent tension between the problem being solved and the industry's structure. Energy grids in the developed world have been built as centralized, heavily regulated systems typically operated by one or two large utilities in any given area. When overloaded by major weather events, the result is blackouts—a pattern seen annually in California and Texas.

The need for more resilient energy infrastructure is well understood, but the path forward has been complicated by the industry's complexity. DePIN offers potential solutions by incentivizing individuals to contribute to grid resilience—reducing peak consumption at the basic level, or at more advanced levels, providing battery capacity and EV charging infrastructure.

Virtual power plants represent one instantiation of this concept. Companies like Fuse Energy in the UK have achieved notable success with approximately 60,000 users actually paying for energy through their platform. However, Fuse took an extremely ambitious approach, building a vertically integrated operation from solar farm ownership through direct consumer distribution. This capital-intensive strategy reflects the complexity of disrupting energy markets.

Other players like Sourceful and Power Ledger take more consumer-focused approaches, selling hardware that allows homeowners to measure and monetize their contributions to the grid. The market remains nascent, but the thesis is compelling: as AI drives unprecedented energy demand, distributed solutions become increasingly necessary.

Robotics and Physical AI

The intersection of robotics, AI, and DePIN represents what Valliani describes as her favorite topic and potentially the most exciting frontier for decentralized infrastructure. The thesis sits at the convergence of three major technology narratives: artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and American reindustrialization.

The growth of robotics—including humanoids, drones, and autonomous vehicles—is accelerating due to declining hardware costs. However, the data required to train these systems is dramatically insufficient compared to what's available for large language models. Estimates suggest physical AI training data represents only one to five percent of the corpus available for LLMs.

"There's no sort of set of like Reddit posts and user generated content and blog posts that can train these models," Valliani observed. "What you need is models trained off like real world physical data."

This creates a massive opportunity for DePIN networks to collect the physical world data needed to train robots. Companies like BitRobot and Drones are working on various approaches to distributed data collection, creating datasets that could inform the next generation of autonomous systems.

The Venture Capital Problem

A recurring theme throughout the conversation was the structural tension between DePIN's capital requirements and the expectations set by venture capital investment models. Valliani identified this as a broader problem with how technology ventures are financed, not specific to DePIN, but particularly acute for hardware-dependent infrastructure projects.

"I think what you've identified is maybe a broader problem with venture capital and how we think about capital formation in tech generally," she explained. "The way that we've structured a lot of incentives, both in terms of how you get outsized outcomes as an entrepreneur, where we cast a lot of attention as an industry, we look for these massive multi-billion dollar outcomes that are unseating major monopolies."

The venture model that demands 100x returns has created expectations that every technology startup will pursue massive end states. While this ambition has produced remarkable results—Helium's customer acquisition costs are reportedly significantly lower than incumbent telecoms, and the network is adding 2,000 mobile subscribers daily while competitors lose customers—it may not be well-suited to all infrastructure challenges.

DePIN presents particular challenges because it requires interdisciplinary expertise spanning blockchain technology, deep domain knowledge in the target industry, and hardware engineering capabilities. Finding founders who can bridge all three areas is rare, and the hardware component requires substantial capital outlay that other crypto projects can avoid.

Valliani suggested that AI may ultimately change this dynamic by dramatically reducing the capital required to start and grow companies, potentially leading to more founders who start companies without seeking venture investment. However, for now, DePIN's capital intensity often necessitates venture backing with its attendant expectations for scale.

The Realistic Timeline for DePIN Success

One of the most notable aspects of the conversation was Valliani's candidness about the timeline for DePIN to achieve its potential. While crypto markets typically operate on compressed timelines, with capital formation and attention cycles measured in months rather than years, DePIN requires a fundamentally different temporal framework.

"Crypto is a very fast moving market," Valliani acknowledged. "And I think when it comes to things like hardware, it's easy for us to be impatient. But the reality of almost every tech cycle is it takes multiples of years and not months to go through."

She pointed to stablecoins as an instructive parallel. Five to seven years ago, venture investors were backing stablecoin projects that seemed interesting in theory but hadn't achieved significant adoption. Now, post-GENIUS Act, stablecoins represent perhaps the dominant narrative in crypto, with major companies scrambling to develop stablecoin strategies. The lesson: patient investment in compelling theses eventually pays off, even if the timing is difficult to predict.

The five to seven year timeline Valliani suggests for DePIN breakthrough isn't arbitrary—it reflects the reality of hardware manufacturing cycles, the complexity of regulatory environments in infrastructure industries, and the time required for distributed systems to achieve the scale necessary to compete with incumbents.

Why DePIN Success Might Be Invisible

A counterintuitive point Valliani raised is that DePIN's biggest successes may occur without consumers ever knowing. Unlike consumer-facing crypto applications where users interact directly with blockchain technology, many DePIN use cases involve contributing infrastructure or data that powers products delivered through traditional channels.

"I think we can see this make a huge difference in people's lives without them even knowing it," she explained. "If you think about the major users of a company like Hivemapper, yeah, a lot of them are on the supply side, helping with the mapping, but a lot of them are just using their map powered by Mapbox or Lyft—they don't know that Hivemapper sold that map to them."

This dynamic suggests that DePIN's impact metrics may need to be reconsidered. Rather than measuring adoption by consumer awareness, success might be better gauged by the extent to which DePIN-powered infrastructure underlies mainstream products and services.

Token Design Philosophy

The conversation turned to how tokens should be designed and deployed in DePIN contexts—a question with significant implications for both project sustainability and contributor economics. Valliani offered a framework rooted in the fundamental value proposition of DePIN: redistributing value creation from centralized platform operators to the people actually doing the work.

"One of the most beautiful parts about DePIN is it takes a lot of the markets that I think have accrued value to centralized actors over the past 15 or 20 years and it busts those open and gives those to the people who are actually in the work to make a network work," she explained.

The classic framing—"imagine if Uber had been owned by the early drivers"—captures the philosophical appeal. But translating this vision into effective token economics requires careful design. Valliani observed that many DePIN projects rush to launch tokens prematurely, which she views as a strategic error.

"The way to approach it if you want a network to be successful is where do I need to incentivize people in the supply side of the equation to make sure that the demand side is satisfied with the product," she advised. "Really work from first principles there."

The token should be designed to appropriately value and reward work that genuinely contributes to network growth, with mechanisms that correlate token accrual to productive contributions. This is easier said than done, particularly given the crypto market's history of speculation overwhelming utility.

The Spoofing and Proof Problem

Every DePIN project must contend with bad actors attempting to claim rewards without providing genuine value. Fake nodes, spoofed locations, and fraudulent contributions represent existential threats to network integrity. Valliani noted that solving this problem requires sophisticated proof mechanisms.

"Every DePIN project has dealt with just bots and spoofers," she acknowledged. "And so this comes into more complex technical needs where you have to have some kind of proofs of location or proof of work in a different instantiation in order to make sure that you have contributors doing real work."

The demand side of DePIN networks—the companies actually purchasing the infrastructure services—increasingly requires verification that network contributions are authentic. This has spurred innovation in proof systems, with projects like Jito developing a restaking platform specifically focused on helping DePIN projects extend their verification capabilities.

AI Robotics: The Cold Water Perspective

While the robotics data collection thesis represents Valliani's most exciting narrative for DePIN, she was notably candid about its current limitations. The market for robotics training data remains extremely small, with fewer than 20 potential buyers among centralized robotics companies.

"The most difficult part about this thesis is that all of these companies are—a slight exaggeration—a lot of these companies are depending on being able to sell this data into a small number of centralized companies that wouldn't want it," she admitted.

Several questions remain unresolved. How do you generalize data collection to meet the varied needs of different robotics companies? Will there be enough buyers to create venture-scale opportunities for data collection companies? Can DePIN data collectors compete with in-house collection efforts at well-capitalized companies like Tesla?

Valliani outlined potential paths forward. Some DePIN projects are pivoting from pure data collection to building and licensing their own models. The scale of data required might be so vast that centralized collection becomes impractical even for well-resourced companies. And the open-source ethos of blockchain technology might create opportunities for more interoperable, permissionless data resources that benefit the entire robotics ecosystem.

The Data Collection Scale Challenge

To illustrate the magnitude of the robotics training data challenge, Valliani pointed to reports that Tesla pays $48 per hour for people to fold laundry to help train humanoid robots. This seemingly mundane task contains enormous complexity: differences between folding a onesie versus a t-shirt, handling still-wet items, dealing with static cling between garments, managing situations where multiple items are grabbed together.

Now extrapolate from laundry folding to all the other capabilities a useful humanoid robot would require: navigating stairs (including icy stairs), operating in rain, handling fragile objects, responding to unexpected situations. Each edge case requires training data, and the edge cases are nearly infinite.

"Think about all the things you need to just train a humanoid robot and laundry folding," Valliani said. "Then think about all the other things that you might want a humanoid robot to do. Walk up and down the stairs, walk up and down icy stairs, navigate rain."

The scenarios where robots would be most valuable—disaster zones, dangerous exploration environments, extreme weather conditions—are precisely the scenarios where data is hardest to collect through centralized means. This asymmetry suggests a natural advantage for distributed collection networks that can tap into diverse global contributors.

Policy Transformation and Its Implications

While no longer leading policy at the Solana Foundation, Valliani offered perspective on the dramatic shift in the regulatory landscape following the GENIUS Act. She described the current moment as "incredibly exciting" for the industry, with the establishment of a regulatory framework that legitimizes stablecoin operations.

"Finally, I think there is a regulatory perimeter that legitimizes what stablecoins look like, the issuance of them, and you're seeing tons and tons of companies that I think were maybe crypto curious for years but never really wanted to touch the stuff wake up and think, how do I incorporate this stuff in my business?" she observed.

The regulatory clarity has implications beyond stablecoins. By establishing that the United States is a viable place for crypto builders, the GENIUS Act provides incentives for entrepreneurs to build domestically rather than seeking more favorable jurisdictions abroad. Additionally, US regulatory frameworks often set floors that other countries reference when developing their own policies, potentially expanding the impact beyond American borders.

For Valliani, the policy development reflects years of education work paying off, creating a foundation for the next wave of crypto innovation to occur in the United States rather than elsewhere.

The Talent Pipeline Challenge

One structural challenge facing DePIN and crypto more broadly is the difficulty attracting top-tier talent. While crypto offers significant financial opportunities, the perception gap between crypto and fields like AI means that graduates from elite institutions often don't consider crypto careers.

Valliani attributed this partly to the industry's poor storytelling. The compelling narratives about financial inclusion, infrastructure resilience, and economic empowerment exist but aren't communicated effectively to people outside the crypto bubble.

"Our largest challenge is that we really do a bad job of telling the story," she acknowledged. "We tell our stories at high level, maybe like I just did, like blip by them in phrases, but we're at a point as an industry where you're starting to see companies building this direction that have real traction."

The insularity of the crypto industry compounds the problem. Conference circuits tend to feature the same participants, and opportunities to reach broader audiences through mainstream venues like CES or major festivals are underutilized. Breaking out of this echo chamber is essential for recruiting the interdisciplinary talent that DePIN particularly requires.

What Success Actually Requires

Throughout the conversation, a clear picture emerged of what DePIN success requires: patience measured in years rather than months, founders with rare combinations of blockchain expertise, domain knowledge, and hardware capabilities, token designs that reward genuine contributions rather than gaming, proof systems robust enough to detect fraud, and storytelling compelling enough to attract talent from outside crypto.

The $400 million already returned to DePIN contributors on Solana demonstrates that the model can work. The question is whether the ecosystem can scale this to $4 billion and beyond while maintaining network integrity and building products that truly outcompete centralized alternatives.

Valliani's realistic assessment suggests that while many DePIN projects will fail—consistent with the 98% failure rate of startups generally—the ones that succeed could be transformative. The parallel to stablecoins is instructive: a narrative that seemed speculative five to seven years ago is now undeniably mainstream. DePIN may follow a similar trajectory.

The Incentive Design Evolution

Early DePIN projects made errors in incentive design that later entrants have learned from. Helium's initial approach of emitting tokens regardless of coverage location meant that many early nodes provided little actual value to the network. More recent projects like XNet require applications to run nodes, creating a more selective process that matches rewards to network value.

Valliani emphasized the importance of this evolution: "Within any network, some nodes are just going to be more valuable to the network than others. And so it actually makes better business sense to be a little bit elitist or something in the way that you apportion the rewards."

This represents a maturation of DePIN design philosophy. Rather than treating all contributions equally, effective networks must develop mechanisms to identify and reward the contributions that most advance network goals. For telecommunications networks, that might mean coverage in underserved areas; for data collection networks, it might mean edge cases that improve model robustness.

The Enterprise Demand Side

While much discussion of DePIN focuses on the supply side—the individuals contributing infrastructure or data—the demand side is equally critical. DePIN networks ultimately need paying customers, whether that's telecommunications companies buying coverage, map providers purchasing geospatial data, or robotics companies acquiring training datasets.

Several projects have achieved notable demand-side success. Helium's offloading deal with Telefonica in Mexico demonstrated that major telecommunications companies are willing to purchase coverage from decentralized networks. Hivemapper's deals with Lyft and Volkswagen show enterprise appetite for crowd-sourced mapping data.

These enterprise relationships provide both revenue and validation, demonstrating that DePIN outputs can meet the quality and reliability requirements of sophisticated buyers. As more such deals are announced, they create precedents that make subsequent enterprise sales easier.

The Open Source Imperative

Valliani argued for the importance of open-source approaches in DePIN, particularly for robotics training data. If one goal of crypto is to create a more open, interoperable internet, then the data underpinning the next generation of autonomous systems should be accessible rather than locked in proprietary silos.

"I think we should be rooting for companies doing this type of decentralized open data collection to provide sort of interoperable permissionless places that other people can build and use for their own models," she suggested.

This open-source orientation aligns with blockchain's philosophical foundations while creating practical advantages. Open datasets can be improved by broader communities, reducing the burden on any single project while increasing overall quality. The challenge is creating sustainable business models around open resources—a challenge crypto's token economics may be uniquely suited to address.

Looking Forward

The conversation painted a picture of DePIN at an inflection point. The infrastructure has been laid, early projects have demonstrated viability, and the narratives around energy resilience and AI data needs create compelling market opportunities. But significant work remains to translate this potential into mainstream impact.

Valliani's five to seven year timeline acknowledges both the ambition of DePIN's goals and the realistic pace of hardware-dependent innovation. For builders and investors willing to take that long view, the opportunity may be substantial. As she noted, betting on the future of robotics in the real world should be a bet on DePIN's methods for data collection.

The ultimate measure of success won't be token prices or TVL figures but rather whether DePIN networks actually deliver more resilient infrastructure, more equitable economic participation, and better AI systems than centralized alternatives could provide. The next several years will reveal whether that promise can be fulfilled.

Facts + Figures

• DePIN networks on Solana have rewarded deployers and contributors approximately $400 million in the last year and a half
• The Solana Foundation's goal is to scale this to $4 billion in rewards as quickly as possible
• Helium Mobile is gaining approximately 2,000 subscribers per day while competing mobile networks are losing subscribers
• Helium's customer acquisition cost (CAC) is reported to be significantly lower than the telecom industry average
• Tesla reportedly pays $48 per hour for people to fold laundry to help train humanoid robots
• Physical AI training data represents only 1-5% of the data available for training large language models
• Fuse Energy has approximately 60,000 users in the UK paying for energy through their platform
• Venture-backed startups have approximately a 98% failure rate according to industry estimates
• The target market for robotics training data currently has fewer than 20 potential centralized buyers
• Hivemapper has announced deals with Lyft and Volkswagen for map data
• Helium completed an offloading deal with Telefonica in Mexico for network coverage
• The time horizon for meaningful DePIN breakthroughs is estimated at five to seven years
• Amira Valliani was the first-ever Head of Policy at the Solana Foundation
• Projects mentioned as DePIN infrastructure examples include Wingbits, 375 AI, SkyMapper, Sourceful, Power Ledger, BitRobot, Shaga, and others
• Jito is developing a restaking platform specifically for DePIN proof verification

Questions Answered

What is DePIN and why does it matter for Solana?

DePIN stands for Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks, which use crypto coordination mechanisms to build real-world infrastructure through distributed contributor networks. For Solana, DePIN represents one of the most tangible use cases for blockchain technology, with networks already rewarding contributors $400 million over the past year and a half. The Solana Foundation views DePIN as a major growth vector, with the goal of scaling contributor rewards to $4 billion. DePIN matters because it demonstrates that crypto can solve real-world infrastructure challenges beyond pure financial applications, from telecommunications to energy to data collection.

How long will it take for DePIN projects to achieve mainstream success?

Most DePIN projects should expect a five to seven year timeline before achieving breakthrough success, according to Amira Valliani. This extended timeline reflects the hardware dependencies inherent in DePIN—manufacturing and deploying physical infrastructure simply takes longer than deploying software. Valliani points to stablecoins as an instructive comparison: projects that seemed speculative five to seven years ago are now clearly mainstream following regulatory clarity. While the crypto industry typically operates on compressed timelines, DePIN requires patience consistent with traditional technology cycles.

What are the biggest opportunities for DePIN growth on Solana?

Three primary narratives are driving the most significant DePIN growth opportunities. First, DePIN for national infrastructure capacity addresses the brittleness of centralized systems exposed by COVID-19, with projects tackling shipping tracking, satellite communications, and logistics. Second, energy grid decentralization offers solutions to increasingly strained and fragile power infrastructure, particularly relevant as AI drives unprecedented energy demand. Third, robotics and physical AI data collection represents potentially the largest opportunity, as the training data needed for humanoid robots, drones, and autonomous vehicles is dramatically insufficient compared to what's needed.

Why do DePIN projects struggle to attract top talent?

DePIN and crypto more broadly face a storytelling problem that makes recruiting difficult. The industry does a poor job communicating compelling narratives about financial inclusion, infrastructure resilience, and economic empowerment to audiences outside the crypto bubble. Additionally, the crypto industry's insularity—attending the same conferences, talking to the same people—limits exposure to potential talent from other fields. DePIN has the additional challenge of requiring rare interdisciplinary expertise spanning blockchain technology, deep domain knowledge, and hardware engineering. Until the industry improves its external communications and presence at mainstream venues, attracting top talent will remain difficult.

How should DePIN projects think about token design?

DePIN tokens should be designed from first principles to reward contributions that genuinely advance network goals, rather than rushed to market prematurely. The token should correlate with actual value creation—ensuring that contributors who do more valuable work receive proportionally higher rewards. Many early DePIN projects made the mistake of distributing tokens equally regardless of contribution quality, which attracted speculators and gamers rather than genuine network builders. The best approach is to delay token launch until there's clear understanding of what behaviors need incentivizing and mechanisms to distinguish valuable contributions from noise.

What challenges do DePIN projects face with fraud and spoofing?

Every DePIN project must contend with bad actors attempting to claim rewards through fake nodes, spoofed locations, and fraudulent contributions. This requires developing sophisticated proof mechanisms—proofs of location, proofs of work, and other verification systems. As the demand side of DePIN networks (the companies purchasing services) becomes more sophisticated, they increasingly require verification that contributions are authentic. Projects like Jito are developing restaking platforms specifically to help DePIN networks extend their proof capabilities. Solving the fraud problem is essential for DePIN networks to maintain integrity and satisfy enterprise customers.

Can DePIN projects compete with centralized companies for robotics data collection?

The competition between DePIN data collectors and centralized companies like Tesla is not yet resolved. Centralized companies have significant resources—Tesla reportedly pays $48/hour for people to fold laundry for training data. However, the sheer scale and diversity of data needed may make distributed collection more practical. Robotics training requires data from endless edge cases—different weather conditions, unusual scenarios, various physical environments—that would be impractical for any single company to collect comprehensively. Additionally, DePIN's open-source orientation could create more interoperable datasets that benefit the entire robotics ecosystem rather than just one company.

What role does policy play in DePIN adoption?

Regulatory clarity, particularly through legislation like the GENIUS Act for stablecoins, creates the foundation for broader crypto adoption including DePIN. Clear regulatory frameworks legitimize blockchain technology for companies that were previously hesitant to engage, creating new potential customers for DePIN services. US regulatory frameworks also set international precedents that other countries reference when developing their own policies. For DePIN specifically, regulatory clarity around tokens, securities law, and infrastructure regulations can determine whether projects can operate openly in the US or must seek more favorable jurisdictions abroad.

Why is the venture capital model problematic for DePIN?

The venture capital model's requirement for massive returns creates expectations that every startup should pursue billion-dollar outcomes unseating major monopolies. While some DePIN projects may achieve this scale, many valuable infrastructure problems are smaller in scope but still worth solving. DePIN compounds this challenge because it requires significant capital outlay for hardware and manufacturing, making bootstrap approaches difficult. However, AI may eventually change this dynamic by reducing the capital required to start companies, potentially enabling more DePIN projects to grow without venture backing and its attendant expectations for massive scale.